You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [84]
But unlike the products of some other companies on this list, the uniforms weren’t directly responsible for killing people. In fact, since they actually made the wearers uncomfortable and smelly, relative to the rest of these companies Hugo Boss probably deserves a medal.
4. VOLKSWAGEN
German automaker Volkswagen came on the scene just before World War II. The company was founded by Ferdinand Porsche, the granddaddy of those fast, expensive cars that douchebags drove in the 1980s. But before all that, Porsche was lead designer of the most mass-produced car of all time: the Volkswagen Beetle.
Job with the Nazis
Porsche’s partner in masterminding the Beetle: Hitler. See, in 1934 ol’ Adolf asked the German automobile industry to develop a “suitable small car” that could be used by everyone in Germany. The Beetle was Porsche’s entry in the great Nazi design-off and was apparently just what the führer had in his clown-shit insane mind. A year later, Hitler announced that thanks to Porsche, the Third Reich had been able to “complete the preliminary designs for the German Volkswagen” a word that is German for “people’s car.”
How evil were they?
The Beetle is perhaps the most misunderstood car in history. People look at its rounded shape and anthropomorphic face and instantly think of love and peace. In reality, it was designed to Hitler’s specifications and, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, manufactured with the famous Nazi work ethic, known outside of the Third Reich as “Jews from concentration camps and prisoners of war.”
You have to give credit to Porsche for designing a car so impossibly cute that we forget it was brought into this world by the worst thing that ever happened.
3. IBM
IBM is one of the few IT companies whose history dates back to the nineteenth century. On one hand, this means it has been a Fortune 500 company since 1924. On the other, over a century of history gives you a lot of opportunities to make some monstrous PR blunders.
Job with the Nazis
You’re probably thinking, “IBM is American! The closest America ever got to the Nazis was when Indiana Jones wore that uniform as a disguise in Raiders!”
Actually, prior to the war American business took what can be generously described as a morally ambivalent stance on Nazi enthusiasm for an Aryan master race. However, once the war started most American businesses disavowed Hitler’s regime. IBM, on the other hand, decided to stick around and see where he was going with this whole “final solution” thing.
Back in those days, the only way to keep track of huge databases was with an extremely complicated system involving punch cards, and IBM was the best at constructing and maintaining those databases. Its databases could keep track of anything: financial ledgers, medical records, Jews . . .
As soon as the Nazis invaded a country, they would overhaul the census system using IBM punch cards and use them to track down every Jew, Gypsy, and any other non-Aryan on record.
How evil were they?
The unabashedly anticorporate documentary The Corporation shows actual footage of IBM punch cards used in prison camps. They tracked people based on their religion, their location, and even how they’d be executed. For instance, Prisoner Code 8 was Jew, Code 11 was Gypsy. Camp Code 001 was Auschwitz; Code 002 was Buchenwald. Status Code 5 was execution by order, and Code 6 was gas chamber.
IBM claims it was a victim of circumstance. It had a subsidiary in Germany before Hitler took over, and the company just fell under Nazi control, like every other company over there.
But the records suggest that’s not the whole truth. IBM sent internal memos in its New York offices acknowledging that its machines were making the Nazis more efficient, and it made no efforts to end the relationship with the German